Putting the Shine on Your Marriage

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

So first off, I want to tell kind of a background for me. For those of you that have been premarital disciples by myself and my wife and that kind of thing, you’ve heard most of what I’m going to say. I’m just banging the same old drum, so that’s good. And Sean’s already plugged it, but this is the book on marriage for Gloria and a covering. That’s the one in the back of your little brochure. I’ve been exposed over 33 years now of being a Christian. I was involved in noothetic counseling down at Grace Community Church. I trained people and was trained in that by, oh, that guy’s Smith, Dr. Smith, when when he first came out to California to bring the Master’s College and all of that up there.

Wayne Mack and I served together. So I know lots of those books. None of them even come close to this. So that’s why we had the strong recommendation of that. And we’re not interested in the psycho-babble. We’re interested more in the true way you get involved in this kind of thing. John’s already kind of stolen one of the thunders, which he knew he would, which is okay, because we’re all going to pound the same thing, I hope. If we’re all saying something different, we’re in trouble, aren’t we? If you have a problem in your marriage, it’s most likely you. Okay? And it is that simple. And it is amazing how if you just can get yourself calm down and sit down and think about it, you realize, oh, because I pushed that, that caused that. And especially for us guys, I’m mainly going to pound on you guys and what a joy you have and should have when you realize your wife shines your glory back on you. She is the one that is like the mirror for you. So if things aren’t so good, maybe you’re or not worthy of being reflected.

So you are the problem. Yes, it’s your problem, not your partner. All right, so what is marriage? The interesting thing is you know this by principle. And most of the things that are stated in this book and that we’ll state, you just know in your gut they’re right. But when you really meditate on them and think about them, it changes your whole perspective. And even after you’ve done this for quite a while, I’ve been married now 46 years. 13 of them is a pagan. 33 is a believer. About every two weeks, I go, oh, that’s what that’s about. And it’s the same old thing, but we’re kind of stupid And we just keep getting banged up the side of the head with it.

But one of the great things about being a Christian is that one of my favorite things is in first John three were promised to be made in the image of Christ of our true believers. And he has a way of just keep peeling those layers and making you face up to what you have to now graduate to so that your partner can reflect back on you. All right. The interesting thing about marriage is it is not unitary. Okay. It is not just you two against the world, that kind of thing. Adam was unitary, undivided and alone in chapter one of Genesis. And then chapter two comes along. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man while he slept and took one of his ribs and closed it up in its place with flesh.

flesh and the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, This is last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. For just as the first woman was divided from the first man, so every man since then has first been divided from his mother.” Isn’t that interesting? God takes a piece of the man to make woman. He breathes, makes man out of the dust. Then he takes a piece of the man to make woman and And then everybody going on comes out a woman.

Wow, that’s crazy. Really amazing. Before the first woman could be united sexually with the first man, she had to be divided from him. Before any man since that time can be united sexually with a woman, he has to be divided from a woman. Ah, that’s really crazy. And it’s so just basic reasoning for society, you know. We’re just turning everything upside down all the time, you know. Oh, today I think I’m a woman. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be a guy. And then Thursday I’ll be a dog, you know. It’s crazy. Hello. In short, marriage as difference and unity is woven into the nature of all creation and is consistent with it. with it. Man has no authority to fight. Man can name what God has done, but man cannot get God to name what man has done or is trying to do in his own name. Legislatures or courts can decree that men can now start marrying men, and those institutions can also, while they are at it, decree that water will start flowing uphill. And that ain’t going to happen. That was written in 2006 in this book. Now it’s 2016 and man can marry man and women can marry women.

It’s crazy. It’s not right. It’s wrong. We don’t buy into that. Okay. Then we have another passage of scripture that scrambles everybody’s brain and I’m going to jump into it because this is the one where it does say that you’re the woman is the glory of you as men, you husbands. There’s a lot of parts in this scripture that have scrambled people and we’ll comment on those as we go along, okay? This is 1 Corinthians 11, 1 through 16. Be imitators of me as I am of Christ. Now I commend you because you remembered me in everything and maintained the traditions even as I delivered them to you. But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ. The head of every wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.

Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head, but every wife who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head. It is the same as if her head were shaven, for if a wife will not cover her head, then she should cut her hair short, but since it is disgraceful for a wife to cut off her hair or shave her head, let her cover her head. Now verse 7, For a man ought not to cover his head, Since he is the image and glory of God. But the woman is the glory of man. For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. So she is the glory of man.

wife is your glory. That’s why a wife ought to have a symbol of authority on her head because of the angels. Nevertheless, in the Lord, woman is not independent of man nor man of woman. For as a woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman, and all things are from God. Judge for yourself. It is proper for a wife to pray to God with her head uncovered. Does not nature nature itself teach that you, that if a man wears long hair, it is a disgrace for him. But if a woman has long hair, it is her glory. For her hair is given to her for a covering. Now what does all that mean? The center verse there is what I want to reflect on.

That’s why my title is Put the Shine on Your Marriage, realizing that your wife reflects your glory. But there’s a lot in here that a lot of people get hung up on. We’ve had people in our congregation that have worn head coverings and they decided they didn’t need to and all of those things. Don’t get lost in that discussion for right now. Let’s just pay attention to the idea that woman is reflecting your glory. So this whole section here is about partaking of Christ. as Christ partakes of the Father in 11.3, verse 11.3. So men partake of Christ and women partake of their husbands. This is obviously not the only kind of partaking possible.

For example, both men were together partake of Christ, Galatians 3.28. But all partaking is some kind of covenantal partaking. So you make the choice that God gives you you the ability to choose him and all of that. You start relating with him. He relates with you. You relate with your wife. We all have this bargain. Out of that comes our families. Out of that can come our churches and all the rest of it. We cannot go anywhere to opt out of partaking together. For example, a man can partake of his wife, Ephesians 5.31, or of a prostitute, 1st Corinthians 6.16, but in either case he is partaking. And if he rejects women entirely he is partaking of the doctrine of demons. 1 Timothy 4, 1 through 3. 1 Timothy 4, 1 through 3 says, Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from food that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.

It’s just crazy. Whole denominations forbid the priest to be married. What kind of example is that? What how can he even relate to the people? You know, it’s crazy. This said, we have to ask what preconditions are for covenant partaking and marriage for blessing. The first is that you must have an explicit covenant surrounding the sexual relationship. Listen to this sentence. Not everyone who is sexually united is married, and not everyone who has exchanged vows with another is married. Uh-oh. The covenant exists when two elements are there together, covenant vows surrounding a covenant union. The second precondition is the grace of God.

of God. Remember that St. Paul said that he partakes by grace, 1 Corinthians 10 30, and the grace of God manifests its presence in our lives by means of the fruit of the spirit. The third precondition is clear awareness of the assigned roles that God has given to husbands and wives respectively, particularly in worship. This relates to the question of worshiping God covered and uncovered. John spoke this morning, for those of you who weren’t here, to show that our liturgy in our church reflects a marriage, two people together, the union of all of us together. We confess our sin. We recognize who we’re worshipping.

We covenant with him at the end of the service with our communion, all the rest of it. We learn about him. All these things we do together. And as you do that together, it strengthens everybody together, which then makes each part of the body stronger. So when the toe gets sick, the knee can help and all the rest of that, you know, leg bone connected to the thigh bone kind of stuff in God’s pattern in God’s way. Glory increases as it descends.

Whoa. Think about that in God’s pattern in God’s way. Glory increases as it descends. He who descended has ascended, who is the one that descended Christ? What did he do for us? Gave us the path to be with God. Cured the problem of sin for us. So in God’s pattern, in God’s way, glory increases as it comes down to us. In Christ, the one who has descended the furthest, all the glory of the Godhead is revealed. To know Christ is to know God. Man bears the image of Christ and woman bears the image and glory of the man. That’s really, if you just can get your head wrapped around that and think about it over the next six months a year, that your wife is reflecting your glory and that she bears the image and glory of you, that’s really amazing.

And it’s really cool too. When both of you are clicking, you just know it, okay? And when you’re not clicking, you know that too, and that’s the time when you repent, all right? And it’s just that simple. Jim mentioned the other day about the Bob Newhart thing on counseling, and it really is true. You listen to people, you know, when they want counseling, and, oh, they got this big problem, and they did this and they did that. And basically it’s stop doing that and start doing this. Oh, but you don’t understand. No, I understand. Stop doing that and start doing this. That’s Ephesians 4. If you haven’t read it, read it.

It’s the best counseling chapter there is. You steal, steal no longer, get a job, and give away stuff. OK. It’s pretty simple. But people don’t like that. It’s too simple. You don’t understand. And on and on and on it goes. And those are the things. But you didn’t bake the dinner right. I told you I like beans and you got carrots. What are you doing? You know. We never have that problem at our house because we have all these families and kids and everything all under the same roof. And then we have people come over and it’s really bad. So conversely, this glory is revealed through submission. Christ submitted to the glory of the father, men submitted to the glory of Christ, and widens submitted to the glory of the husband.

Who is doing this? Of course, once we come over to this side of the creator-creature divide, we have to deal with husbands and wives who are in revolt against this cascading glory. Uh-oh. We have this perfect situation, and what do we do? Because we’re sinful creatures. we keep screwing it up. And what do we do, as Sean well stated, repent, ask for forgiveness, and move on. But I forgave him just last Tuesday, and on Thursdays, he’s asking me for the same thing. Oh, that’s the 70 times 7. I don’t want to do that. Do it. Just that simple. Remember that such revolt does not eliminate the partaking, but it does eliminate the blessing of partaking.

Further, it incurs the judgment of a jealous God who hates it when husbands and wives tempt him.” Was it? What? When we’re fighting, we’re… What is that? Further, it incurs the judgment of a jealous God who hates it when husband and wives tempt him. What’s happening when you’re fighting? What are you doing? You got your eyes off the way God wants you to behave. So what are you doing? You are not submitting and giving the proper worship to God. are submitting and worshiping who, you, what you want. It’s the same old thing.

When you send, what are you doing? I made the choice, I’m doing what I want. How about what God wants? No, no, no, you don’t understand what I want. Oh, maybe you do understand that’s not too good, right? So, all this stuff’s pretty simple, but it’s really mind-boggling when you start thinking about it. We live in a man-centered age and consequently we often miss the entire point of God’s warnings. We think that the judgment on our marital sin is a mere judgment of an unhappy marriage and that death at least would end that. Oh man I got strapped with this lady and she’s really bad and so at least death will do us part you know because I’m a righteous Christian. No no no. But many husbands and wives really need to consider their ways and live.

How many husbands would come under the judgment of Christ for how they neglected these things during the course of their marriage? Did they live as though Christ were their head? How many wives will have to answer for how they stumbled their husbands and families? Did they live as though their husbands were the head? So the answer to that is probably sometimes maybe, depending on how holy you have become. And here, I always like to say this all the time, this is one of the big problems in the Christian life. As you become more holy, the more evil you know you are. Each time you peel away that layer of the onion and you step up and get a higher rung up here, you realize how wicked and inside you are.

So therefore, then you have to ratchet that up a notch. So it’s this never ending thing till we die and get to go to glory. But as you enjoy that process, God blesses you with all kinds of things that, that, uh, you don’t know about now. And when you see them and experience them, you just go, that’s really cool. You know, and you give God thanks that he fixed that in a way that you couldn’t even possibly have thought would be fixed.

The chief end of marriage is the same as the chief end of man. And all the students at ECSA to glorify God, enjoy him forever. Right. The chief end of marriage is not to have your needs met. The chief end of marriage is not to get your husband to finally see it’s not just get your, uh, get your wife to be more responsive. The chief end of marriage is to glorify God and enjoy him on his terms forever. You’re doing it as a unit now, and your unit, usually, if you’re blessed, makes more little units that you have to then train up for the next generation. And hopefully, you train that one up to be better at it than you were.

And we’ve had the joy of seeing that happen, at least in the generation after us, and it looks like it’s going to carry on to the generation there. And it’s a real joy to live with people and see that happening daily. And it’s also kind of a pain in the neck when your six-year-old comes up to you and reminds you, hey, Bob, you got to shape up because you’re not treating Gigi right, you know. But other than that, you know, you kind of slap them and tell them to go in their room and go see them. But that is a joy in the right kind of Christian family is that when the kids look at you and you realize, Oh my goodness.

And then, of course, the favorite thing too, and a lot of you have had that, when you have to ask forgiveness from your three-year-old, that’ll put you where you belong. So we have seen that the creation of man and male and female is not unrelated to God’s pronouncement that the whole creation was very good. That’s in Genesis 2, very good after he made the woman.

Remember when you read Genesis 1, It says man and the man and the woman were in the garden and all of that and he pronounced it good So it wasn’t good that Adam was alone, but after he made the woman then everything was good Okay But the same thing is true of the new creation in Christ and the new creation the relation of husband and wives Is the thing that makes it cook? I mean It’s been going on for quite a while now and they are not going to find a better substitution Than the human family just ain’t gonna happen I think an interesting thing, and these are things that Wilson does in his writings and his blogs, and he’s just very clever this way, but this book has the title for a glory and a covering, and John Newton wrote a wonderful hymn that alludes to this passage in another passage in a wonderful way.

Tying together, John Newton wrote Amazing Grace, for those of you who don’t know, Trying together is most certainly an unimportant illusion by the Apostle. The hymn is, glorious things of thee are spoken. And the relevant, or relevant lines are for a glory and a covering. I show that the Lord is near. The prophet Isaiah, speaking in the times of Doug says new covenant. I say day of the Lord, for those of you that are in the covenantal The dispensational debate refers to the Shekinah glory, the glory that used to accompany Israel in the wilderness. This is Isaiah 4.5. Then the Lord will create over the whole site of Mount Zion and over her assembly a cloud by day and smoke and the shining of a flaming fire by night.

Over all the glory, there will be a canopy. So he will cover them in that glory, just as your wife covers your household and you, and reflects that back. The new King James translated in this way, for over all the glory, and you’ll notice that I quoted Isaiah 4.5 and the ESV did the same thing, for over all the glory there will be a covering. This is what Paul is referring to, a godly wife to her husband, what the Shekinah glory was to the tabernacle. Now this is how it all ties in with our foundational theology and marriage and what we believe marriage actually is. The Bible teaches that a woman is the glory of her husband.

She is his crown. A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband, Proverbs 12a. Now, now, now we don’t quote verses 12a. We quote the whole verse, okay? Verse 12-4, An excellent wife is a crown of her husband, but she who brings shame is like rottenness in his bones. Ooh, that second part’s not good. If I told you not to do that, no, no, no, you live it out, she lives it out. She’ll correct hers if you do yours. An excellent wife is like the crown of her husband, but she who brings shame is like rottenness in his bones. A man does not walk down the street kicking his diadem, his crown, in front of him in the hopes of making himself look better or more important.

Exodus 34, 12-17 says, Take care, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land to which you go, lest it become a snare in your midst. You shall tear down their altars and break their pillars and cut down their asherim. For you shall worship no other God, for the Lord whose name is Jealous is a Jealous God, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land. And when they whore after their gods and sacrifice to their gods, and you are invited, you eat of his sacrifice, and you take of their daughters for your sons and their daughters whore after their gods and make your sons whore after their gods.

You shall not make for yourselves any gods of cast metal.” In the scriptures, jealousy is a virtue. This maybe is the chapter when people go through this book that they go, wait just a second, he’s saying that I should be jealous. And the answer is absolutely. Like all good things, it can be bent and distorted into sin. But for some reason, we have come to think that it is necessarily sinful, which is not the case at all. As a result, we are in a modern world are not nearly jealous enough. Our rejection of this virtue of jealousy is one of the ways we have refused to imitate God. If you have something worthy to possess, and you’re possessing it correctly, and somebody wants to mess with that, you have a right to defend that.

That’s yours. Don’t touch my stuff. Okay? Not bad. God’s jealousy is fierce. The scriptural testimony is very clear on that point. Moreover, this passage, the passage, refers to jealousy are overwhelmingly positive and the fact that our default assumptions about jealousy are negative should tell us something about how unscriptural our worldview has become. As we have seen, God’s name is jealous, Exodus 34 14. In In the Ten Commandments, God’s visit the iniquity of the fathers to three and four generations precisely because of his jealousy, Exodus 25 and Deuteronomy 5.9. We are not to carve images for ourselves, to worship because God is a consuming fire, a jealous God, Deuteronomy 4.24.

We should fear God and swear by his name, being identified with that name, mindful of his capacity for anger and judgment. Why? He is a jealous God, Deuteronomy 6.15. Joshua knew that the Israelites’ easy believeism – yeah, back then they had easy believeism – would not stand the test of God’s jealousy, the whole chapter of Joshua 24. God’s jealousy is not really about making particular accusations. Jealousy builds a fence, but does not make assertions about individuals who don’t know why you put the fence there. You can lock your doors at night without accusing every person who walks by of attempted thievery. And you can pull back when someone crosses your friendly line without accusing that person of attempted adultery.

adultery. God jealously sets particular standards for friendship, for get-togethers, for business lunches, for entertainment standards, for dress and so on. Many fathers, for example, are not nearly jealous enough when it comes to how their daughters dress, and they might be surprised at how much it costs to have a daughter look that cheap. Hmm. By its very nature, jealousy is possessive. But jealousy goes wrong when it tries to possess things that it has no rightful claim to. But when you possess things that you have a claim to and you possess them correctly, that needs to be defended. That gives security. That makes that person and those people worthwhile. They are worth your defense. Okay? The issue is not whether jealousy will be possessive, but whether it will be a a godly jealousy that is possessive of the right things, or an ungodly jealousy that is possessive of the wrong things or trivial things. A man who is possessive of his wife’s sexual favors is possessive in the right way. A man who

wants to deny other men the right to ever look at his wife’s face is being possessive where he has no right to be. Now there’s an additional comment here which is common Muslim standard. You know how they wear the hijab and have the little covering of the face. The interesting thing is when you really think about all the other religions beside ours, it’s unitary. You have this bossing God who dictates these standards and he unitarily does this with no relation to him. It’s only in Christianity that you have the Trinitarian God who is always relational with himself and then comes down and relates to us. In all the systems where you have this unitary God who’s like the dictator telling everything, there is no relationship there. But our God, a Trinitarian God, comes down and dies for us. God dies for us. Who could make such a system except God? That’s so upside down to standard reasoning and all the rest of it.

And yet, through that and through His Spirit, When we act right, we treat our wives right, we do all the stuff we should be doing, it works wonderfully. And gives example to those next generations. So, the Muslim is being possessed in where he has no right to be. There is no indication in scripture that a husband has the right or responsibility to set that kind of standard. A man or a woman should be jealous over things like sexual infidelity, emotional flirtation, significant amounts of time spent elsewhere when it should be spent at home, money squandered when it should be invested in the home, and so forth. Assuming a balance that rejects the wrong kind of possessiveness, one of the things we must learn in this modern age is the fact that the right kind of possessiveness is a good thing and that it helps establish real security in the marriage.

By cultivating this possessiveness, we are becoming like Jesus Christ in his bride. So bottom line, you need to really think about how your wife, because I’m talking generally to the man, I mean, Sean mentioned it, but the diagram is the vertical relationship is the man and the wife are worshipping God. The man, though, is on a higher plane because who is he responsible for? His wife. His wife reflects his glory, and he is actually responsible in some crazy way for her sin because he’s taken her under his wing and he needs to be responsible for her. That’s a hard thing to put your head around if you’ve got some problems going on.

But the thing is, if you do it right and she repents and you repent and all of that and you keep going back and forth, those things can get cured and together then you start reflecting your glory. But the whole issue is, if you’re not in that right relationship, the vertical one first for you as the man, the vertical one for her, then the two together, then the kids underneath. And the kids watch this. I mean, you guys know it all the time. The greatest lesson to see how you’re doing is watch how your kids are imitating you. And sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s scary. But it is part of life. And it’s exciting when, as a person now who’s a grandfather and all that kind of stuff, I look back and it’s really, let’s see, I don’t want to say this, it’s a joy to see those generations understanding those principles way before I ever understood it or Gail understood it.

We came to the Lord late. I came at 37. She was 35. We were on a fast track. We learned a lot of stuff in a big hurry and got involved in all kinds of things. But to see six-year-olds and your nine-year-old grandson and stuff tell you things that just, you know, make your heart because it’s being reflected in that next generation, you know. And then to be able to sing our song, you know, Bless the Man Who Fears Jehovah, and get to sing the second verse, to see your children’s children at your table, that’s really an exciting thing and a really glorious blessing to have reflected back from your wife, and then you see your daughter reflect that to her husband and see those little future wives that can do that and future little young men men that are going to go up and do that.

And that is one of the things we’re trying to pass on here, and it’s really simple. So the basic thing that I’m trying to push here, jealousy is a good thing, and if you don’t believe that, chapter three here, read it over and over, you’ll get it. But the other really big thing, and this is for you husbands, is to think how your wife is reflecting your glory. If she’s reflecting well, that’s really cool. And it’s a joy. If she’s not, repent. And not the wife, you repent. And she will then be able to reflect your glory.

Okay. Father, we thank you for this time together. I thank you that you enabled Doug to write such a book. And when it’s done well, I think we honor people by just quoting it, going through it, re-explaining it. For all the people that have been through marriage counseling with me and Gail and other people that have used this book, it’s a great tool. And we thank you that you enable men throughout the generations to boil this stuff down and yet give it to us so that we can and pass it on to other people. And help us to do that. Help each one of us husbands to be that man that you would have us be. And that that then would be reflected in the next generations.

We thank you, of course, most of all, for your son, Jesus Christ. For without him, we wouldn’t even have a path to come to you for any kind of request or thanks. So thank you for that. And of course, thank you most of all for him. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.